Popular reviews

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  Review by fran hoepfner ★★★★½ 6

  couple in front of me whispered so much, in constant state of explaining the movie to each other. it’s not that confusing: playing fast and loose with chronology, alternating between shallow bitchiness & unbearable pain — I wish I could have saved them the convo & just said the movie is about the sensation of scrolling thru instagram, poetry and all. 

  that Jack Lowden performance is really revelatory! like if I start typing about it, I probably won’t stop. I’m kinda losing my mind about it. magnetic, wise, frustrating, empathetic, humane! I think harder than “comedy” or “drama” it is hard to act like a smart person, especially one so simultaneously burdened by his own mind but always called on to say something petty about Bartok. genius alert!

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★★

  From a pair of dreamy memoirs about his formative years (“Distant Voices, Still Lives,” “The Long Day Closes”), an archival documentary that excavated the city in which those years were spent (“Of Time and the City”), and swooning adaptations of the novels and plays that allowed him to make sense of his own wounded soul (“The Deep Blue Sea”), Liverpudlian auteur Terence Davies has established himself as one of the most achingly personal of master filmmakers; this despite his adamant belief that his personal life is “really boring.”

  In a 2017 interview with IndieWire, the ever-confessional ex-Catholic insisted he’s “terrified of the world.” Davies spoke about his bitterness at being gay, conceded he’s “too self-conscious” for sex, and repeated a…

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★½ 4

  83

  In Benediction, there's a thrilling and disjointed balance of spoken poetry and cinematic language - its methodology portrays an existence for Seigfried Sassoon which offers no escape, no relief from its myriad of horrors. Terence Davies creates a formal space to represent the main character in the present, as subjectivity is distorted and thrown into the wind. Wartime archival footage in overlays and dissolves are often accompanied by excerpts of Sassoon's poetry, only to be disrupted by more traditional scenes of high-class wit and guarded humor. The lightness is always on the verge of ceaseless doom, with tonal shifts that honor the plight of the protagonist. Sassoon has no control over his trauma, and the lack of linearity is…

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  Review by reibureibu ★★★★ 16

  A life trapped in dissolutions: one the trauma of war, of survivor's guilt and intrusive memories of the past that impede upon the present, and the other the cold intimacies of queer love that know only to make interred memories. Men enthralling men as open secrets, but none love each other so much as they love their amorism. They won't open up, won't give a part of themselves up, and one wonders if these cruel little games and displays of frivolity emerged as responses to the blasé social world which surrounds them, an indifference to indifference (spoken) and difference (unspoken). He opens up perhaps too eagerly, too quickly, a desire to find a queer kinship and queer sincerity (a queer…

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  Review by Logan Kenny ★★★★★ 6

  the world will take from you everything. your love, your ideals, your hope, your dreams, your words, your soul, your future. all you have is your past, overlapping constantly in your mind, reminding you of all the people who have died, all the places that have irrevocably changed, all the decisions you wish you’ve made. there are moments of true grace, heightened by the fact that they are destined to end, sooner than you’d ever hope or want. Davies’ filmography is built upon some of the saddest works of cinema I’ve ever seen and while there are frequent moments of levity and wit, this is the most utterly devastating and existentially contemplating work of his. some of the things he…

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  Review by steffi955 ★★★★

  Normalize becoming Scottish at an old age

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  Review by Ella Kemp ★★★★

  “Quick to tears, slow to love.” 

  Will only get richer on a rewatch. Gorgeous in every sense, focused yet panoramic look at a life defined by love and loss in ways that can be quite destabilising. Jack Lowden is - we knew this already but never more than here - incredible.

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  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★ 1

  Davies once again finds in poetry the ability of a suffering artist to give a name to "their terrors" while failing to overcome them. His first explicitly gay text is as steeped in self-loathing and repressed desire as his more subliminal expressions of sexual identity, with numerous scenes of lovers' quarrels between those who can only be open around themselves but still feel such distance between each other. This might explain how this is Davies's most brightly lit film and yet interiors still manage to conjure chiaroscuro shadows in the margins of frames, a reminder that even as the characters speak freely about their desire and frustrations that all of this takes place in parlors away from "normal" society no…

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  Review by IsabelSandoval

  The closeted gay men here quipping straight out of a Whit Stillman.

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  Review by jorgemol ★★★★ 1

  Catty twinks throwing one-liners at each other. This is Gay Twitter.

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  Review by Chris 🍉 ★★★★★ 8

  There’s a little bit of god in every dissolve in this film. I can’t bear to see people on here criticizing the editing. Completely defies modern standards of filmmaking to create something wholly unique unto itself, somehow flawlessly honoring every written word without needing to resort to on screen text. I can’t put into words how thankful I am that Terence Davies is out there making movies like he does. The cattiness caught me off guard but contrasted with the despair of the first act and the conclusiveness of the final shot, put in the context of early 20th century Britain, I think it made perfect sense. Wasn’t sure how to feel about the casting but god Jack Lowden blew…

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  Review by Anwen ★½ 7

  If I wanted to watch 2 and a half hours of gay people being horrible to each other, I would simply scroll down my Twitter feed.

  I truly hated this one. This film had absolutely no tenderness. It was quite simply a litany of identikit gay men all making the exact same snarky comments about POETRY and ART and WOMEN and insulting each other, interspersed with some 90s-style slow fade transitions and some completely incongruous war-time footage of decomposing bodies on the battlefield.

  I did a quick Google after the film ended, and it turned out that two of the main characters were supposed to have been lovers for 6 years, which blew my tiny mind because the only scenes…